Fishing With My Dad

My dad was a plant grower on the weekdays, and a sea hunter on weekends. He photographed everything I caught on our weekend journeys offshore, and subsequently I would pick up the camera and shoot everything that he caught, which was followed by a group photo posing with a day’s worth of dead fish. The chest freezers in the garage began to multiply as our mission to catch fish became increasingly obsessive. Throughout my youth, most of my pictures were made during our fishing adventures. Normal day-to-day life at home just didn’t seem interesting enough to photograph by comparison. At sea, we might come across a floating elephant seal carcass, snag into a skate egg casing, or be shat on by a seagull. We might hook into a mysterious something that took off with our entire spool of line, or accidentally land the smallest Mako shark I’ve ever seen on a bait of equal size. These escapes into the vast sea wilderness just offshore from the bustling suburbs of Southern California, with my father wearing his Champion Sprinklers hat, inspired me to seek out experiences beyond the town limits. I followed my childhood dreams of being a professional fisherman and carried my camera along to document the absurd, the mysterious and the beauty that surrounds a life at sea.